One of the parts I love about taking on a creative challenge is the uncertainty it brings – not really knowing what to expect from the effort, and usually not really knowing how the effort will be channelled. Another valuable part comes from the opportunities to learn. They go hand-in-hand, of course, and the List of Loss project is a great example.

Internalizing someone’s poetry to the tune (heh…) of one new song per month is a challenge with a deadline. It would be a deadline more easily met if I was willing to repeat/slightly change melodies and structures from one month to the next. I’d feel like I was cheating though, and would be far, far less than satisfied. Besides, Gregory’s poetry – while occupying a recurring theme – does not repeat itself. I truly would be doing his words a disservice if I chose repetition as a crutch for ease and quickness.

My composition approach begins with reciting (so to speak) the words until a melody and cadence has come along – a method that hasn’t taken long to provide results, so far. Then the real work begins. What structure would this melody work well in? The January piece (Skin in 13) is a melancholy lead with a choral background. The lyric melody in the February piece (Black Rainbow) sits on top of a gradually building drone and between a repeating hard left-right panned “drone”. For March, I decided to sing over the top of a keyboard accompaniment – which I had to write based on the vocal melody I already had. Well, I did that and it’s complicated enough for me to have trouble simultaneously playing and singing it well. The obvious next step, then, was to record the keyboard part and then record the vocal track. Easily done. Except that the melody changes tempo throughout as dictated by the feel of the words. Recording it that way wasn’t an issue as I was singing along with it. What has proved to be most difficult is singing over the top of the already recorded keyboard part. With no fixed tempo, a click track is useless. And there aren’t any obvious change cues. It’s all by feel. Apparently, I don’t feel it quite the same way each time, as the “syncing” results have been very unsatisfactory.

But “by feel” is how I prefer to work and, frankly, I believe it’s a large reason that I sound like “me”. Which pretty much leaves learning to play and sing the song – Well – simultaneously. That means practice, repetition, more practice, and more repetition. And I can’t take forever to do it, either, as there are a finite number of days left in March.

A challenge that becomes an opportunity to learn. Delicious.